We developed a new approach to identify vulnerabilities to water insecurity across entire archaeological culture areas by combining a paleohydrological model of the sensitivites of hydrological systems to droughts with least-cost analyses of the costs to acquire domestic water. Using a custom Python script integrated into ArcGIS Pro software, we calculated the pairwise one-way cost in time for walking between 225 water sources and 5,446 Ancestral Pueblo cultural sites across the Jemez and Pajarito Plateaus of the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico. This allowed us to identify whether periodic hydrological droughts occurring between AD 1100 and 1700 increased water acquisition costs across these regions. We found that hydrological droughts increased travel times in both regions to durations exceeding modern standards for water insecurity. Beginning in the fourteenth century, greater underlying hydrogeological sensitivities to droughts and the decline of a dual-residence pattern caused by population losses made the remaining aggregated communities of the Pajarito Plateau much more vulnerable to water insecurity than those on the Jemez Plateau. This would have upended long-standing relationships between communities and water on the Pajarito Plateau during a time when socioeconomic integration across the northern Rio Grande Valley pulled people toward valley bottoms.

我们开发了一种新方法，通过将水文系统对干旱敏感性的古水文学模型与获取生活用水成本的最低成本分析相结合，来识别整个考古文化地区水不安全的脆弱性。使用集成到 ArcGIS Pro 软件中的自定义 Python 脚本，我们计算了在新墨西哥州杰梅斯山脉的杰梅斯和帕哈里托高原上的 225 个水源和 5,446 个普韦布洛祖先文化遗址之间行走的成对单程时间成本。这使我们能够确定公元 1100 年至 1700 年之间发生的周期性水文干旱是否增加了这些地区的取水成本。我们发现，水文干旱增加了这两个地区的旅行时间，其持续时间超过了现代水不安全标准。从十四世纪开始，对干旱的潜在水文地质敏感性更大，以及人口减少导致的双重居住模式的衰落，使得帕哈里托高原剩余的聚集社区比杰梅斯高原的社区更容易受到水不安全的影响。在里奥格兰德河谷北部的社会经济一体化将人们拉向谷底的时期，这将颠覆帕杰里托高原社区与水之间长期存在的关系。